Irony inside and outside memes: a case of meme series within relevance theory

• Authors: Dorota Rut-Kluz , Beata Kopecka

Title variants

PL

Ironia wewnątrz memów i poza nimi: analiza serii memów w ramach teorii relewancji

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper examines irony in Internet memes, focusing on its occurrence across multiple layers – a phenomenon observable in meme series rather than in isolated memes. The analysis concentrates on a meme series featuring Polish athletes: football player Robert Lewandowski and tennis player Iga Świątek, the former being the central figure of this partly fictitious world. In the analysis, conducted within relevance theory, irony is understood as a thought, norm, expectation or utterance that is echoed with an underlying dissociative attitude. The study argues that the series of memes forms a scenario, i.e., a set of mutually manifest assumptions about the fictitious world depicted in the memes. Such scenario allows the identification of irony at different layers, with the two main variants being irony outside the meme (when the Internet user expresses irony by posting a meme), and irony inside the meme (when a character in the meme is being ironic). The two ironies typically co-occur, being either targeted at the same person or not. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the variety of ironic meaning is strictly linked to the scenario developed, and also contributes to the entertaining function of the series.

Keywords

EN

affective attitude; echo; irony; meme; meme scenario; relevance theory; social media

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of the Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)
• Year: 2025
• Volume: 86
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 136-154
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Dorota Rut-Kluz

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic

author

Beata Kopecka

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic